Front Page Teaser

Chapter 24

The following day, the pair took a Piper Cub to one of Fiji’s three hundred islands, where Nadia had a reservation at a rustic-style resort.

“This makes me think of the film Cast Away,” Liz remarked, as the two installed themselves in a grass hut with a thatched roof just steps away from the water. The beach hut, or burrah, would have been charming enough from the outside, but it was even more delightful inside. Brightly colored batik spreads covered two beds, and intricate, hand-painted patterns in black and cream adorned the deeply peaked ceiling above them.

Obviously designed for barefoot visitors, the hut’s concrete slab entryway was fitted with a hand-woven straw mat. A dishpan of fresh water sat in front of a small bench there, so visitors might remove sand from their feet with ease before entering the hut.

“Do you see that island there?” Nadia said, pointing to a small mound or rock across the blue water.

“Um hm.”

“That is where the movie you mentioned was filmed. I gather the bar and restaurant at this resort were favored by cast and crew during the filming.”

After changing into bikinis, the pair stepped out of their hut and settled in the shade of a palm tree. Nadia, who knew the resort well, seemed set on reading. Liz, however, took out her book and only laid it on her lap. She found it hard to settle her eyes on a book when she could gaze instead at the expanse of aquamarine water, dotted with distant islands, that was laid out before her. But her book caught Nadia’s eye, nonetheless.

“You carried a library book halfway around the world!” Nadia exclaimed, noticing the call numbers pasted on the book’s spine.

“It’s one Ellen was reading before she disappeared,” Liz said, and explained to Nadia how she gained access to Ellen’s library record.

“You and Mrs. Swenson have missed your callings,” Nadia chuckled. “You should have taken up my line of work. But that’s a children’s book, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I suppose Ellen might have been reading it to Veronica.”

“May I take a look?”

“Of course.”

Nadia read aloud the blurb on the back of the paperback. “‘Margaret’s father died in a mysterious drowning accident when she was eight years old.’” She stopped and looked hard at Liz. “When did Ellen take out this book? Do you know?”

“Sometime last November, I think. I’ve got my folder about the case in my suitcase. I could check on it.” Liz retrieved the folder from the grass hut and returned to the chaise lounge under the palms. “Here’s Ellen’s borrowing record.” She spread it out on her knees. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found was borrowed November 16 and returned the next day.”

“Then that may well be the book she wrote to me about. She never mentioned the title, but in a letter she wrote in mid-November, Ellen said little things, even picking up a children’s book, were stimulating flashbacks. This book perhaps reminded her of her father. He died in a drowning accident when she was eight years old, you know. She always referred to him as her hero, her ‘Rock of Gibraltar.’ She was a—how do you say it?—‘father’s girl.’”

“‘Daddy’s girl.’ I suppose reminders of his death stirred her up emotionally, leaving her more vulnerable to those flashbacks.”

“That is how she saw it. I imagine she never read that book to Veronica. That’s why she returned it the next day.”

“Seems sensible. Look at this,” Liz said, handing to Nadia the library record.

“There are shadowed lines here and here on the paper.”

“I asked Olga to make a copy of the reading list for me. I wonder if she did a little cutting and pasting of a longer list. Ellen’s friend Lucy Gray told me she had seen Ellen’s library record and it worried Lucy to know Ellen had been reading about child abuse.”

“Why would Mrs. Swenson wish to hide that from you?”

“The book in question was a self-help book. Look, it’s this one: Silent Knights. Olga must not have realized the nature of the book from its title, since the subtitle is not listed here. It has to do with having the courage to address one’s propensity for engaging in aberrant behavior. Although I had the impression from Ellen’s librarian friend that there was just a single book in question on this topic, maybe that was not the case. Perhaps Ellen had taken out another book along those lines and Olga did not wish for me to know it.”

“You mean it looked like Ellen was a child abuser? Ridiculous!” As if to wash away that foul notion, Nadia leapt up from her chaise lounge and strode into the sea.

It was nighttime before the two women addressed the topic of Ellen again. Lying on their backs in their beds, neither could settle down immediately. For Liz, it was a case of overexcitement at the unexpected visit to Fiji. Nadia seemed unsettled after making radio contact with her colleagues.

“It seems you do not wish to tell me about the specifics of your job, Nadia,” Liz said.

“It’s not a question of wishing to tell you or not. I cannot tell you.”

“Can you tell me, at least, if I’m correct in assuming that you are working in intelligence?”

“You are correct about that.”

“For whom are you working?

“I will tell you what I tell everyone who asks: I am an interpreter working on various United Nations projects.”

“Is the U.N. actually your employer?”

“Please, Liz. Understand I have told you all I can regarding my job.”

“Can you tell me something about Ellen, then? Was she also engaged in espionage?”

Nadia laughed. After a pause, she said, “I’m sorry to make light of your question. If you think our correspondence contained some sort of coded messages, you are mistaken. In fact, Ellen lost a briefcase full of old letters from me, and her purse, when we were in New York.”

“I was thinking more about the book she had in her possession—some sort of phrase book for intelligence officers.”

“Such books are not top secret and, while they are not sold in Barnes & Noble, they sometimes turn up in used-book shops. You might get in touch with the Brattle Book Shop in Boston and see if they have any record of selling it to her. I remember the shop name because I looked up the word brattle in my dictionary to see what it means. It wasn’t in the dictionary, so I assumed it’s the owner’s name. In one of her last letters, Ellen was most enthusiastic about a purchase she said she made in the Brattle, saying it would enrich our meeting. Since she never did give me a book when we met in New York, I now ask myself if it is possible that purchase was the phrase book that enabled her to greet me in Arabic.”

“I will check with the Brattle, of course. It does seem likely she was preparing to meet you. But then, I’m troubled, too, about her interaction with the cabdriver.”

“You mean he might have been an intelligence contact? You should know, Liz, that those kinds of machinations—a certain cab collecting a certain woman at a major train station—only happen in the movies, not in the life of actual espionage agents. It’s actually much more likely, unfortunately, that a certain woman would become the victim of a random psychopath encountered when she gets into the wrong cab.”

“What did she tell you about that cab ride?”

“Not a lot, Liz. We were so focused on meeting one another for the first time. She did tell me she surprised the driver by thanking him in his own language. When she did so, she said, the color drained from his face. That’s not an expression I’ve heard before, and it was very memorable. But it was even more memorable because Ellen seemed so—how do you say it?—shook by the encounter.”

“Could she have overheard anything significant in his radio conversation?”

“From what she said, it sounds to me like the driver was talking about her or another woman in sexual terms. You mentioned he used the word teena several times. As I told you, that is the word for fig, but it also refers to a woman as a sort of tasty dish.”

Suddenly, a sharp, shrill chirp pierced the air. Liz sat up and turned on the bedside light.

“Is there a bird in here?”

Nadia burst out laughing. “No, no! It’s just a lizard.”

“What do you mean ‘just a lizard’?” Liz said, hopping out of bed and shaking out her sheets.

“Take a look at the ceiling.”

Liz looked up and saw that part of the pattern painted there seemed to move. It was a lizard scurrying directly above her head. Then she saw another one, closer to the peak of the ceiling.

“Will they drop down on us?” Liz asked.

“I hope not. If they do, I believe they are harmless.”

“Startling, though,” Liz said, returning to her bed.

“Certainly. Think about it, Liz. A lizard in the night would make great fodder for a postcard message.”

“Let’s write one for Ellen.”

“If we post it, Erik will know we’ve been together.”

“That’s true. And, before we met, you told me you had something to say about him. I had the impression that the ‘something’ might have been a reason for Ellen to leave him.”

“She wrote that Erik had a problem with outflow at work. There was dirty business, money laundering. There was no doubt she loved her husband, but I thought she might separate herself from him to retain power over her own resources.”

“She wrote this? Did you discuss it further in New York?”

“Yes, she told me in a letter. And I asked her about it in New York. She said he’d found a way to recirculate the flow, so the outgo problem was not so serious. I felt she rather brushed off my concern, which, of course, was magnified once again when she went missing.”

“Oh Nadia! I think you’ve misunderstood. I’ve been to Erik’s workplace. He was working on designing an environmentally friendly washing machine. The costs of refining it were running high, largely due to his water bills, so he found a way to use recirculated runoff from his parking area to test the machine.”

“No wonder Ellen seemed unconcerned in New York! All these years I have prided myself on my English comprehension, but most certainly I read that letter all wrong!”

“You can’t blame yourself. The best linguists can get stumped on slang and jargon about machines.”

“But now you’ve come all this way, and my information is worth less than nothing.”

“Is that what you were writing about when you advised Ellen to be careful about leaving the family circle?”

Nadia seemed to weigh her reply.

“It’s little wonder you sought me out,” she finally said “Yes, I did advise Ellen to think carefully about shattering the family circle. I did not think it was worth doing for financial reasons. And, as I mentioned, I worried that the hypnotist she considered consulting would lead her to think a family member was the figure in her flashbacks.”

“I, too, would have questioned her involving a hypnotist. But we’re still left with the fact that Ellen was overcome by the flashbacks. If she could not prevent them happening, she may have felt she was not in control of herself. And if she had an impulse to abuse, it would account for her leaving Veronica. By leaving her, she would be protecting her. The flashbacks you tell me about indicate a woman who felt out of control, overwhelmed.”

“Well, yes, the flashbacks seemed to overtake her. But when she spoke of them in New York, she was more worried than frantic. Even if they did make her feel as though she was losing control, it was not regarding handling herself with her child. She did not have it in her to abuse. I’m certain of it. No, Liz, I must say, it struck me that she wanted to face the flashbacks head-on and eliminate the source from which they sprang.”

“But didn’t you tell me she was reluctant to discover who the figure in the shadows was?”

Nadia did not reply. The two women stared up at the ceiling in silence. Liz wondered, could we have found a reasonable motive for suicide? Or, for the murder of the figure in the shadows?

“Ayeeeeeee!” Nadia shrieked, jumping from her bed and shaking a lizard from her sheets. Liz jumped up, too. Laughing, Nadia said, “Do you happen to have an extra postcard?”

“Eleven September 2001,” Nadia said aloud as she wrote the date on the postcard. “Someday, we hope, we will all sit down together and we will tell you how we came this far to find you,” she added and handed the card to Liz.

“The occasion for this postcard is easier to sum up,” Liz wrote. “Just call it ‘The Curious Incident of the Lizard in the Nighttime.’”

After signing their names on the postcard, the two women got into their beds and, pulling their sheets completely over their heads to shield themselves from falling wildlife, attempted to drop off to sleep.

September 12 dawned pink as the inside of a seashell. Liz looked at it, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, through the lens of her camera. She had not slept well with the lizards chirping above her through the night. While she headed down the beach to photograph the Fijian sunrise, Nadia had gone in search of coffee at the island’s tiny shop and outdoor dining complex. Liz was zooming in on the “Cast Away” island when Nadia signaled her from the front of their grass hut.

“Come here right now,” she ordered.

There’s a side of Nadia I’ve never seen! Liz thought, impressed with the woman’s bossiness. Liz raised a finger to indicate, “Just a minute.” She wanted to catch in a photo the sun’s arc rising over the horizon, like the edge of a fabulous doubloon.

Nadia strode down the beach with a purposeful air that only made her look comical, dressed as she was in a sarong and flip-flops. “It’s very bad in the States,” she declared. “You must come immediately.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Manhattan is under attack.”

Liz stood stock-still.

Nadia repeated the news. “Manhattan is under attack.”

“By what? By whom? And Boston?”

“Not Boston. My contacts tell me Boston is not yet hit.”

“Not yet?”

“I hope it will not be. But it’s not just New York. The Pentagon has been hit.”

There was just one television in reach and it was not quite on the island. Nadia outlined the unbelievable as the two made their way to it. Housed on a luxurious yacht anchored offshore, the television was only accessible via boat. Unfortunately, all of the island’s kayaks were already tethered to the yacht. Stripping to reveal bikinis, Liz and Nadia grabbed Styrofoam boards fitted with plastic windows, designed to be used by leisurely swimmers to look at life on the coral reef below.

“Normally, I could swim this distance,” Nadia said, “but under the circumstances, I don’t trust myself.” It was the first time she indicated her own agitation over the news.

The swim was anything but leisurely. Once on the yacht, they strained to see, on a miniscule television screen surrounded by some half-dozen tourists, the media coverage of the terrorist attacks on New York City. One viewer expressed confusion.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why are we finding out about this a day later? They keep saying this happened yesterday.”

“We’re eighteen hours ahead of New York time,” the yacht owner explained. “In real time, the planes flew into those buildings while we were sleeping, at around three in the morning here. But it was around eight in the morning yesterday in New York City.”

Nadia prevailed on the yacht owner to let her use his radio. Liz stood transfixed in front of the television. Despite the tropical heat, she shivered. Nadia pulled her aside.

“My contacts say U.S. airspace is closed and is likely to remain so for days. I must move urgently. I cannot tell you where. It is best that you do not accompany me. I shall take the next Piper Cub to the main island.”

“I’ll help you pack.”

“There’s no need.”

“Yes, there is. It will steady me.”

With the images of the attack in her mind, Liz was grateful for the swim board as the two made their way back to the island. As Nadia strode toward their hut, Liz rushed to the outdoor dining area, which was open an hour earlier than normal. On the blackboard that usually announced the day’s specials, someone had written, “Breakfast on the house. We pray for the USA.”

Liz accepted two coffees, two bananas, and two slices of pineapple bread and carried them back to the grass hut. “Please eat some of this. You don’t know when you’ll have another meal.”

Nadia waved her hand toward a Piper Cub in the sky. It was headed for their island. “No time now,” she said.

Liz removed a notebook from the Ziploc bag she kept it in and stuffed the pineapple bread in its place. She zipped up the bag. “At least take this,” she said.

“And you take these,” Nadia said, handing Liz the postcard they had written during the night and a wooden bangle bracelet. “For Ellen.”

“Then you still have hope for her?”

“In times like these, hope may be all we have.”

As Nadia slogged through the sand, Liz stood before their hut, gazing at the extraordinary beauty of the sea spread out before her. Islands that she knew were surrounded by fabulous coral reefs thrust themselves up from the water, looking as remote and unspoiled as any place in the world could be.

Ravenous for this peacefulness, ravenous, even, for breakfast, Liz fetched the fruit and coffee and downed every sip and morsel of the meal for two, sitting cross-legged in the sand. Every so often she pressed her hand into the sand, as if to get a literal grip on the world.

Then she went to the boat dock, which was the hub for both boat and plane rides to and from the island. Learning she could not even leave for the main island until the following day, she signed up for a midnight fishing expedition. Then she swam to the yacht again and watched, as did people around the world, the relentlessly repeating images of planes slamming into New York City’s Twin Towers.

Finally, the day came to an end and, long after night fell, Liz made her way to the boat dock. No one else had signed up for the fishing expedition. Nonetheless, the guide was eager to take her out in his small motorboat.

“It will help you to sleep, the fishing,” he told her as he steered the boat out onto the black water.

“It’s so strange,” she said, “not to be in my newsroom when news like this is breaking. Here I am, a world away, in paradise.”

“The world is smaller than you think. When it comes to World War III, no one on Earth is a world away. And nowhere on the planet is paradise.”

Feeling stripped of the one illusion that had helped her get through the day, Liz tried to steady herself by looking at the sea. When the boatman turned off the motor, the vessel settled on water so still that the stars shimmered on the surface. Looking up, Liz realized the points of light were arranged in unfamiliar constellations. She was so far from home that even the stars offered her nothing to steer by.

The boatman brought her back to earth by handing her a drop line. “I’m sorry for the children tonight,” he said, as Liz dropped the lead-weighted line, with a small plunk, into the water. “This is a time for nightmares.”

They sat in silence, mulling over that thought for a long time, the serenity of the scene quietly protesting, “It can’t be so.” Then, Liz felt a strong pull on her line. With much ado, she hauled in a twenty-inch fish, the largest she had ever caught anywhere in the world. Under the boatman’s flashlight, it was revealed to be bright blue.

“That one is very good eating. You must have it for breakfast.”

“I couldn’t cook it. Please, take it for your family.”

“No, they will cook it for you at your place. Taste your good fortune before you return to the States.”

“Yes, all right.”

With enhanced sensitivity, born of the day’s trauma, to every small thing, Liz shuddered at the sound of the boat’s motor starting up again. It seemed to thunder the fact that she must return to a very changed world. She was grateful, at least, that the noise covered the sound of the beautiful blue fish’s last gasp.

Having traveled by train from New York City, Samir Hasan stepped off the Green Line trolley at the Newton Highlands T stop and pulled a sheet of paper from his small backpack that contained Ellen’s purse. He scrutinized the map he had printed on a computer in the New York Public Library. Then he set out in the direction of Fenwick Street near Newton City Hall. While making the half-mile walk along sidewalks banked with shoveled snow and crunchy with rock salt, he reflected that he was ill dressed once again. In the World Trade Center, it had been a question of style. Now the problem was fabric. His thin jacket, which was more than adequate for his work driving a heated taxi, was hardly hefty enough to fight the chill breeze that sent sheets of snow flying from piles all around him.

At least here, in a town of many Volvos and top-of-the line SUVs but few pedestrians, it was easy to tell no one was following him. Why did that provide him with a sense of relief? He wanted to believe he still had a chance to get the woman and himself out of danger. But how?

Why should such thoughts cross his mind? What was it about the shaqra that caused him to question the mission he had been assigned? Just because she moved to help him in the restaurant, just because she asked him about his son, were these enough to stop him from carrying out his promise?

What promise? He had never pledged to end this woman’s life. Not with his own hands. In the New York City mosque, when he’d been asked to transmit the list of code words, he knew the cause justified killing. Killing on a large scale, perhaps. But he himself was only a—what was it called in English?—a cog. A cog in the turning of a bigger machine. Now he was called upon to be the wheel that crushes. Was he man enough to do this deed? Or, was he strong enough to listen to his heart, to save this woman from the danger in which he had placed her?

Every time he considered warning her of the danger she was in, the thought was paired with panic about the practical aftermath of such an action. His own life would then be threatened, too. How would the two of them—together or singly—elude Fa’ud for any length of time? Perhaps the only course was to kill her.

A gust of wind whipped icy crystals into his face. Samir Hasan squared his shoulders and picked up his pace.

With the cookie-making ingredients set out in the kitchen, Ellen decided to make herself a cup of tea. Taking out the china she had bought in New York City to replace the cup Veronica had broken recently, she realized she now owned an extra saucer, since the shop would sell her only the cup-and-saucer set. Turning the saucer over, she looked again at the name of the china pattern: Forget Me Not.

And then it happened again. A strangely unsettling feeling washed over her like a wave breaking on the side of her head, spilling down her arms and torso, producing a cold sweat. Gripping the saucer in one hand and the kitchen counter with the other, she saw again the marvelous shapes of topiary trees. And then, like a relentless lens trained on a reluctant subject targeted by paparazzi, her mind’s eye zoomed in on a sort of umbrella of pine needles. And, yes, there was the tuneless hum again. And more sounds came to her too. The moan of a man, the man seated stroking himself under the tree. After he moaned, he formed a word, a word starting with the sound of the letter F, and this time he finished the word. With horror, Ellen heard two all-too-familiar syllables, Flicka.

Swedish for “Pretty Girl.” Her father’s pet name for her.

“Forget me not!” Ellen cried out, shocked into a state of mind that was no longer dreamlike in the least. Keenly aware of the saucer in one hand, of the counter edge she gripped with the other, of the shriek of the teakettle, Ellen recalled, with a kind of exhilaration, the sound of a zipper in the shadows, her father standing up, emerging from the shadows, taking her in his arms. Then he pointed, thrusting out his finger as if to stab the air, and he bellowed, in an unfamiliar, throaty voice, “Forget me not, young man! I will not let you get away with this.”

Loosening her grip on the countertop, Ellen picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the words “FORGET ME NOT” on her blackboard. Her hand was shaky, but the writing seemed to settle her. She turned off the teakettle, and without washing the new cup, prepared herself a cup of tea in it.

Marveling at her mastery of these ordinary things, she carried the cup of tea into the living room, sat down in her chair, and then realized she had carried the extra saucer along without realizing it. She set the teacup with its own saucer on the side table and picked up her Arabic phrase book. Still holding the orphaned saucer in her left hand, she found herself tapping it on her thigh as, all at once, the flow of words, words in any language, seemed marvelous to her. So did the sound of her own voice. She sat and tapped the saucer against her thigh and read phrase after Arabic phrase with a facility that had heretofore always eluded her.

Meanwhile, Hasan had made his way to the Johanssons’ front steps. Hearing Ellen through the door, he found himself astonished again at this woman’s ability to surprise him. Perhaps her conversational Arabic was rather good, as he’d originally thought, even though she seemed perplexingly unfamiliar with the word for coffee and the names of some fruits. How could he be certain about the shaqra’s failure or success at understanding the code words? It was all too much for him. Utterly unmanned by the consternation he felt, Hasan did the only thing left to him.

He whispered a fervent prayer for guidance.

Only then did he reach out and ring the doorbell.

Startled, Ellen stood up, and set down her book. She was not expecting anyone. Still holding the saucer, she crossed the room and opened the door.

Hasan could take no chances. Even as he greeted her politely, he strode past her directly into the house, knocking her arm and causing the saucer she was holding to crash to the floor.

Allah be praised! This gave Hasan an excuse to bend down and assist in the cleanup, hiding his face while he continued to deliver the complicated greeting that he hoped would buy him entrée into the home.

“Dear lady,” he said, “I have news of vital importance, which I beg of you to hear.”

“Please, I’ll take care of that,” Ellen said, glancing at the shattered saucer. But she remained standing, afraid to squat near this intruder. “I must ask you to leave.”

“Please, it is for your good that I have come to say . . .”

“I will call the police!”

Hasan clenched the shard, cutting himself. “Ayah!” He cried out, dropping his backpack and the china and standing up suddenly, clutching his bleeding hand.

Alarm overcame Ellen’s instinct to help but Hasan cut short her effort to shove him toward the front door. Holding his uninjured hand over her mouth, he pushed her toward the back of the house, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

“Please, lady!” he urged, as Ellen squirmed free and rushed toward a block of wood holding a set of knives. To prevent her grasping a knife, he grabbed her hands with both of his, including his injured hand, dripping blood. Ellen slipped her left hand from his slippery grip. Disgusted, she shook her bloodied hand over the countertop.

“You!” she cried recognizing him fully now. “What are you doing here? What do you want with me?”

“Hamdu-lillah! I only want to—”

Ellen opened her mouth to scream.

Lunging, Hasan clamped his hand over Ellen’s mouth. But her panic gave her cleverness he did not expect. She relaxed all of her muscles, dropping in a quick movement toward the floor.

Just then, a gunshot rang out.

And Ellen finished her journey to the floor—arriving dead at the cabdriver’s feet.